With the continuing rise of e-commerce, merchants seek opportunities to stay competitive among growing competition. Merchants also strive to exploit opportunities that provide an enhanced purchasing environment to attract new customers and retain existing customers. In the past, traditional techniques like advertising and website navigation features may have been effective to retain customers and maintain a profitable e-commerce website. However, as customers have become more comfortable transacting on the Internet, merchants have been forced to focus on reducing costs to remain competitive among the growing number of merchants offering similar goods and services on the Internet.
More specifically, merchants offering goods and services on the Internet vigilantly look for any opportunity to reduce costs without compromising their product or service, thus allowing them to maintain profit margins despite increased price competition. For example, reducing overhead and operating costs may enable a merchant to reduce product prices and maintain target profit margins while having negligible adverse effects on products add services.
In addition, merchants strive to promote and reward loyalty among customers. For example, providing give-aways, frequent purchaser incentives, and other incentives to customers typically helps a merchant increase the likelihood of return visits by those customers. Accordingly, among other potential improvements, there remains a need to reduce merchant transaction costs while maintaining, or improving, a customer's shopping experience.